Positive thinking is so often seen as a good thing. We get messages all the time that we should look at life as full of possibilities that can all be fulfilled if we only believe. The tendency is that if we look at things realistically, we are told we are being negative and closing off possibilities. The fact is, whether …
Notion-Building….
If you are identified with your idea of the “way to be”, then you are not practicing. You are not being with your experience, letting whatever comes up from that experience come up, and functioning appropriately on the physical plane. Instead, you are keeping a lid on vibrations, or calling them something other than what they are, to keep your …
Shakti and Wisdom….
Everybody loves energy. It is everywhere, and manifests in countless ways. Without energy, there is no life. In my tradition, the term for energy is shakti; the shakti is God’s power of manifestation. Spiritual energy is latent, asleep, in each of us. And the term for that spiritual energy is kundalinī-shakti. In order to return home to who we really …
My Apparently Useless Gift….
When I owned my school of Tai Chi Chuan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had a lot of energy. People would feel it and even I would be overwhelmed by it, yet I had no wisdom. People thought I was something more than I was because they were entranced with the energy and identified me with it. The energy knew things; …
Living Sādhana….
You can’t think your sādhana. And yet that is exactly what so many people do. They think good thoughts and believe that is sādhana. They wear “pure” clothes and eat “pure” food and act “purely”. They “believe” they are doing everything to succeed in sādhana. They are in fact going about it all wrong because they are approaching practice as …
Recent Questions….
People have all kinds of ideas about what spiritual practice is and isn’t, and even when they get an explanation they interpret what they hear or read in all sorts of ways, most of which are off the mark. In this blog post, I will be answering some questions that have recently arisen. If you read carefully, you might find …
Walking Bliss….
Lokānanda samādhi sukkam. The Bliss of the world is the Bliss of samādhi. Sahajsamādhi: walking Bliss. This is why I went to Swami Muktananda. Baba had imbibed and lived this understanding, and I wanted to learn and imbibe it from him. Prior to meeting Baba, I had known very powerful energy experiences. I had seen lights and colors, heard sounds, …
Baba’s Work….
One of the greatest misconceptions about spiritual practice is that it is selfish. Unfortunately, the world is full of pseudo-spiritual “paths” that really are nothing but self-indulgence. Real practice is the opposite. When we actually do it, the world changes on a deep and subtle level. It’s hard to fathom this. Few people want to grasp that by turning inward …
Crumbs….
For many years I have used the story of Hansel and Gretel with the breadcrumbs as an example of how we go Home. For us, the breadcrumbs are still there. We can follow them back to who we really are. The last few weeks my work has been focusing on the self-hate we all have. We have seen that our …
The Rotten Root of Hate and the Route Out….
God is Love. Love is our True nature. If we want to be autonomous, we must reject God, and therefore reject Love. So we twist Love into hate, and call ourselves individuals in our own right. But the small self, the shrunken self, is a prison, and we “know” that and hate it. We all have the memory of who …